from the who-needs-lobbying? dept

Earlier this year, there was a lot of hype and uproar about the revelation that, back in 2012, Facebook had run an experiment on news feeds to see if it could make people happy or sad. While I really don't think the experiment was so crazy, others disagreed. Of course, that was hardly the only experiment that Facebook has run on its users, and over at Mother Jones, Micah Sifry last week revealed the details of another Facebook newsfeed experiment from 2012: one that influenced how and if people voted:

For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.

As the article notes, Facebook had experimented with "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" buttons on its site to see if that would encourage friends to vote, but its civic engagement tactics have gone much further than that. Still, even all the way back in 2010, Facebook had realized that just using those "voter" buttons likely increased voting:

After the election, the study's authors examined voter records and concluded that Facebook's nudging had increased voter turnout by at least 340,000. As the study noted, that's about 0.14 percent of the total voting-age population in 2010. Considering that overall turnout rose from 37.2 percent in 2006 to 37.8 percent in 2010—both off-year, nonpresidential elections—the Facebook scientists maintained that the voter megaphone impact in 2010 was substantial. "It is possible," the Facebook team wrote in Nature, "that more of the 0.6 percent growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook."

Now, for the 2012 experiment, which Facebook doesn't seem to want to talk about very much (and, in fact, it pulled a video about it, after Sifry started poking around, asking questions):

In the fall of 2012, according to two public talks given by Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic, a colleague at the company, Solomon Messing, experimented on the news feeds of 1.9 million random users. According to Adamic, Messing "tweaked" the feeds of those users so that "instead of seeing your regular news feed, if any of your friends had shared a news story, [Messing] would boost that news story so that it was up top [on your page] and you were much more likely to see it." Normally, most users will see something more personal at the top of the page, like a wedding announcement or baby pictures.

Messing's "tweak" had an effect, most strongly among occasional Facebook users. After the election, he surveyed that group and found a statistically significant increase in how much attention users said they paid to government. And, as the below chart used by Adamic in a lecture last year suggests, turnout among that group rose from a self-reported 64 percent to more than 67 percent. This means Messing's unseen intervention boosted voter turnout by 3 percent. That's a major uptick (though based only on user self-reporting).

There were also other experiments to see what types of messages (i.e., "I'm a Voter" vs. "I'm Voting") were more effective.

I'm sure that these kinds of efforts will concern some -- and there are already some people talking about "manipulating the election," but to some extent that's silly. The same is true of just about any political campaigning or "get out the vote" effort. Could there be some concern that Facebook has disproportionate power or (as the article suggests) really only helps one party (more Facebook users are Democrats)? Perhaps, but that's the nature of a (mostly) free and open society where we have democratic elections. Some percentage of the public votes, and lots of people are pushing to either get them to vote or to vote in certain ways. Facebook being a part of that seems interesting to note and to follow, but it's not necessarily a problem or something to be concerned about.

from the sharing-is-caring dept

As anyone who reads my posts can probably tell, I really love politics. I like talking about issues, I like playing polemicist with politicians, and I really, really like voting. There's a sense of pride in voting, where even if I ultimately know my contribution to the running of our society is a small one, I'm still engaged in it. I'm not alone, either. Lots of people like to share the fact that they voted and what they voted for. That kind of pride is a good thing, I think.

While the fear over voting-booth selfies during Thursday's Local and European Elections was mostly exaggerated, there is a real danger lurking inside polling stations for British voters: Sharing photos of completed ballots—something many appear keen to do—is against U.K. law. The Register reports that under various parts of Section 66 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, it is an offence to make public someone's vote after a mark has been made on the paper. Many citizens don't appear to have realised this and have proudly been indicating who they have voted for on Twitter.

Now, my understanding for the reasons of this law is that the government is attempting to minimize any chance of voter intimidation or influencing the votes of others through this ballot sharing. The general idea is that if everyone keeps their voting ballot a secret, the larger public's vote will be more impartial. Here is my nuanced and well-reasoned response to the theory and the accompanying law: "Hahahahahahahahaha!"

The entire notion that keeping pictures and social media out of the vote-sharing game will accomplish anything at all is inherently silly. The culture of politics today is so completely open for discussion that there is an entire industry built around it: the political theater on talk-radio and the twenty-four hour news channels. Any pretense about getting citizens to not talk about who and what they voted for is so naive that it's a wonder the entire notion hasn't been laughed off of the British Islands by now. And, as we've covered before, it isn't just that side of the ocean, either. Right here at home, in Wisconsin, citizens can also face fines and jail time for sharing their completed ballots on social media.

The point is that now that the culture of sharing has grown such that this many people are violating this law, the entire purpose of the law is logically obviated. After all, if huge numbers of people are sharing their ballots, the intimidation factor kind of goes away. It's just a matter of pride from involved citizens. Criminalizing that pride doesn't make any sense.

from the how-might-it-work dept

True democracy is not just about casting a vote every five years. It means citizens being fully involved in the proposal, development and creation of laws. The Commission on Digital Democracy currently being established will consider what part technology can play in helping people to take an active part in the way the country is run.

The commission is setting its sights on "Parliament 2.0", a vision of the future in which citizens participate in online elections, electronic referendums and richer relationships with their political representatives.

In recent years, we've seen technology help people become more involved in debate about all aspects of society. So it is clear that it can play a much greater role in political participation too. As the Commission gets started, it's a good time to think about what we want our digital democracy to look like. There is inspiration to be found all over the web.

Wikipolitics

Technology can enable direct participation in the democratic process, without relying on representatives and without the citizen even needing to leave the comfort of their home.

One particularly useful tool in the quest for a digitally engaged electorate will be online forums. These can be built to manage discussions about proposed legislation in a structured way, making it easy for citizens to participate meaningfully.

Politicians and policymakers can use online forums to crowd-source expertise and the views of citizens on their plans – and to refine their proposals based on what they get back. This "direct democracy" would allow for laws to be based on genuine citizen deliberation rather than merely aggregating the preferences of citizens into a single vote at the beginning of each electoral cycle.

Wikipedia is an example of how this system might work, but it also shows some of the problems that can arise when technology and democracy mix.

Wikipedia has relatively little mechanism for coordinating edits, instead allowing editors to work on their own. Despite this decentralized approach, the quality of articles is generally very high. On the down side, edit wars and sock puppetry – when individuals use multiple user identities to create the impression that their views are shared by others – are an enduring concern.

To help make Wikipedia a trustworthy source, editors can build their reputation by establishing a track record of constructive behavior. Wikipedia has a hierarchy of users for administrative purposes, based on community approval, but all users are considered to have equally valid opinions regarding Wikipedia content. The emphasis is on building consensus; an arbitration committee deals with disputes that remain unresolved.

Reddit, rate it, vote it

More formal mechanisms are to be found elsewhere online that could help provide the kind of format and structure that might be needed to produce good legislation. In Yahoo! Answers, for example, readers can vote up and vote down contributions made by others. Writers who are voted up gain points that indicate their good reputation.
Other question-and-answer forums, such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, use similar mechanisms. This kind of collaboration can be further improved using the kind of real-time, simultaneous editing provided by Google docs.

But again, there are perils. Time wasters, product pushers and disruptive trolls are bad news in online forums and can disrupt the way they operate. In the context of digital democracy, the potential for damage is even higher.

We will need to develop mechanisms that would make it possible for everyone to get involved in Parliament 2.0 in a fair and transparent way. This includes preventing abuse by lobbyists, special-interest groups, and extremists, who may try to thwart the mechanisms for non-democratic purposes. Unlike in traditional voting, which provides each person with one vote, we can't assume that everyone will participate in digital democracy equally. That makes it quite difficult to define fairness. It is also difficult to balance accountability (needed to prevent trolling) and privacy (needed to allow free expression).

Online voting

Computer scientists have made great progress in figuring out how online elections could be made secure. One important idea is to design systems that enable outcome verifiability. This would allow citizens to check that the outcome of an election really does match the votes cast.

To ensure free and fair elections, we also need a property called incoercibility. This means voters cannot sell their vote, or be forced to vote in a particular way. Online voting systems with these features are being developed by researchers around the world and this will soon change the way we participate in elections.

The hope is that, if well-designed and implemented, mechanisms for digital democracy could be built that would greatly increase societal inclusiveness and cohesion, as well as lowering the costs of making democracy work.

Mark Ryan is a Professor of Computer Security at University of Birmingham. Gurchetan Grewal is a PhD student in Computer Security at the University of Birmingham. Both receive funding from EPSRC for computer security research, including the security of online voting mechanisms. Grewal works on the project "Trustworthy voting systems" funded by EPSRC.

from the you-fight-like-a-dairy-farmer dept

Today, the always innovative Humble Bundle launched yet another great new project. This time they've teamed up with Tim Schafer, whom some may remember as the founder of Double Fine and the creator of their insanely successful Kickstarter campaign (and others may remember him as the creator of several classic adventure games). The project is a twist on the standard Humble Bundle system: instead of paying what you want for a collection of existing games, contributors get to vote on various game ideas from the Double Fine team to decide which ones get prototyped. The whole development process will then be live-streamed, and contributors will be able to download the prototypes at the end. The ideas themselves come from a feverous internal brainstorming process called the Amnesia Fortnight, the secrets of which are being revealed to the public, as best (and most entertainingly) explained in the video:

It's rare, maybe unprecedented, to see gamers brought into the development process on such a wide scale and at such an intimate level. Though participation takes the form of an single vote, you can bet that people who get involved will have lots of feedback and questions, and probably a few demands, as the process continues — which, in addition to forging a strong connection with fans, could actually be kind of scary. Today I spoke briefly with Tim Schafer to ask more about the thinking behind the project and his expectations for where it might go. For him, the key revelation from the Kickstarter campaign was less about identifying demand for a new adventure game, and more about discovering that a more transparent development process can be a really positive experience:

We're building off of one of the things we learned from that project, which is that it's okay to open the doors. We've had this Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory thing for many years, and the Kickstarter changed all that.

...

We let people see the making of the game and realized it's okay. You think people will laugh at us or they'll judge us for the work or they'll get mad when we cut something from the game. ... We realized that the players are smarter than people are giving them credit for.

He expressed some slight anxiety at the idea of handing the choice of games over to the public, but it was far outweighed by curiosity:

It's really interesting. Usually I pick, usually I deal with the deciding. I think I just wanted to try a different way to see. I like getting my way some of the time, but not all of the time. If you don't have any sort of agent of chaos or wild card then you never have any sort of evolution of ideas, and fresh blood. ... I really want to see what the people at large have to say, to see if it's different.

Similarly, he noted that live-streaming the development process would be a real dose of reality for some gamers, and he's interested to see how they react. While there's plenty of fun stuff to show, like the Art Jams where they flesh out a game's visuals, there's also the painful side, like the budget meetings where exciting ideas get reluctantly cut. But such things are necessary, and as he notes, displaying them helps to humanize the process — which is something we talk about a lot when it comes to connecting with fans and being open, human and awesome.

It's going to be great to see the results of this team-up. Schafer started his career at Lucasfilm Games when secrecy and control were the orders of the day, and developers tried all sorts of wacky schemes to prevent piracy — that's what he was used to, and he credits the Humble Bundle with helping to inspire a different outlook:

Besides the fact that they bring a lot of smaller, lesser known games to light, a lot of what's inspiring is the business model.

Keeping things secret, hoarding information, protecting your copyright. That's just what I was used to, and Humble Bundle says let it go, open it up, let people have it for a penny or a dollar, let people pay what they want and give all the money to charity if they want.

...

You can't have this 100% watertight, airtight grip on that stuff. You have to make other people not want to pirate, make it easy for them, and respect them enough to let them choose. People respond to not being treated like criminals.

If you want to get in on the project and cast your vote for which games get developed, you can do so over at the Humble Bundle site — there are also two existing prototypes of other games for contributors to download right away.

from the civic-pride-and-handcuffs dept

It's election day, of course, and with that comes some amount of civic pride among a number of voters. That's a good thing, for the most part, and in this era of social media and people sharing photos and videos about their lives, plenty of people are sharing imagery of their own ballot. Perfectly reasonable, right? Well, yes, except when that runs into laws designed to keep your ballots secret. There are, of course, good intentions behind such laws. But mixed in with all those local laws concerning camera usage inside a polling place are some that could cause trouble for people doing something quite ordinary. For example, it appears that people in Wisconsin who decide to Instagram/Tweet/Facebook an image of their ballots, have committed a class I felony, election fraud. And this doesn't appear to just be a law that the state is going to ignore either. It's been issuing warnings to people that they could face felony charges if they do post those photos. Undoubtedly, many will be unaware that they're committing election fraud when they thought they were just showing civic pride. One hopes that officials in Wisconsin, and other states, take the context into account before moving forward with any legal responses.

from the the-internet-bloc dept

We were just talking about how the "internet bloc" of voters may be an important new constituent for politicians to be aware of -- and I've been wondering if there's evidence that the bloc does not, in fact, fall into typical partisan classifications. Alex Howard conveniently points us to the news that Popvox, one of a number of excellent sites for discussing proposed Congressional legislation, has put out a blog post and infographic about the top 50 bills, by interest on Popvox, for the 112th Congress.

I imagine that it will surprise approximately none of you that SOPA was the most popular bill on the site (PIPA came in fifth). And while there may be something interesting to talk about in terms of which bills were most popular, something else struck me that seems a lot more remarkable: look at how many of the top bills had overwhelming support for or against the bill. Nearly all of the bills had a viewpoint that was very strongly in favor of the bill or opposed to the bills. Looking down the list, you have to get to the 7th bill, before you even have one where the majority viewpoint wasn't over 90% (and even on that bill, it's 88%). You don't get any real "split" opinion until bill number 9, HR 3, or the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" bill that hits on a high profile issue that is usually split down partisan lines -- and you can see the for/against are much closer: 56% for, 44% opposed. But that's a rare case.

If we set the cutoff on "in strong agreement" and "contested" at bills where you had over 70% on one side or the other, of the top 50 bills, only 11 fall into the contested category. Meanwhile, 20 of the top 50 bills had over 90% agreement, including each of the top 6 bills. This makes me wonder if sites like these are helping to expose what "the internet bloc" really feels about certain issues. Of course, there are some caveats that should be made clear. It's entirely possible that these votes are skewed, and not a representative sample. For example, if someone who was strongly in favor of, or strongly opposed to, one of these bills points a lot of others to the Popvox bill page, you could see how it would likely lead to getting a lot of votes in one direction. But you would then think that communities on the flip side would also send people to the same bill page to vote the other side.

Either way, it does seem clear that these folks -- who are quite likely more internet savvy and engaged on political issues -- have pretty strong feelings on these topics, and the views aren't in dispute, but strongly agreed upon by a large segment of those internet savvy folks. It seems like an opportunity for a politician to recognize this and really start focusing on supporting what the "internet bloc" has to say...

from the make-it-so dept

I recently talked about how the cynicism of the "internet generation" is only helping to keep broken systems in place. I recognize that many people feel that their vote is useless, and think that voting for "the lesser of two evils" is not worth it. I also have sympathy for those who argue that not voting may, in fact, be better than voting-while-uninformed. But none of that really means that votes don't matter. They absolutely do matter, in a big and important way -- especially when you can bring together a large group of people who really do understand the issues, and don't want to just get pushed around by lobbyists and crony capitalism.

The folks at Fight for the Future and Personal Democracy Media have teamed up to create a website called, The Internet Votes, hoping to get more people -- especially internet savvy people -- registered to vote. They've even set up this nice widget:

This kind of thing matters. As we noted in our "cynicism" post, when a large group of voters speak out, it really does make a difference. It's only when they don't speak out and don't make their views known that the special interests can take over. This latest effort is an outgrowth of the fight against SOPA and PIPA, and if we want to make sure that the RIAAs/MPAAs of the world can't try to push such things through again in the future, then the internet savvy crowd has to make it clear that their vote can and does matter. This isn't about who to vote for -- but being willing to speak up with an informed voice. If you don't like either of the major party choices, there are alternatives as well, and those can make an important statement.

Campaign strategists and pundits are always trying to predict the newest or most important political demographic groups. For a long time, it was seniors. That was followed by the dawn of the "soccer mom" and lately there has been a lot of talk about "NASCAR dads." But the strongest untapped political factor these days is rarely mentioned, despite representing a force central to the lives of nearly every American -- the Internet.

Indeed. Beckerman, by the way, discusses the importance of such a voting bloc in his article describing the official launch of the Internet Association, a group that we discussed -- somewhat skeptically when it was announced a few months ago. Beckerman and the folks who make up the Internet Association seem to be taking the concerns raised to heart, and have made it quite clear that a key element of its platform is to be a voice for internet users.

The three planks of the association's advocacy platform are: protecting Internet freedom; fostering innovation and economic growth; and empowering users. The unique nature of the Internet, free from government control, has unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurialism, creativity and innovation, far beyond imagination. But what about tomorrow? No one can predict what innovations will happen next. But we do know that the Internet's decentralized and open model has been the catalyst that has powered this information revolution.

We've pointed out a few times that we worry when the future has no lobbyists, so as the internet itself rises up and makes itself heard, hopefully a group like the Internet Association can really help.

from the vote dept

It's that time of the year again when SXSW does its annual "panelpicker" effort. I'm on one of the proposed panels, put together by Engine Advocacy, discussing the new era of tech advocacy by looking at the political landscape after the 2012 elections and how startups, entrepreneurs, open innovation advocates and the tech community can better engage in the political process to avoid disasters being pushed by legacy incumbents. The panel will include myself, Mike McGeary from Engine, Elizabeth Stark from both Stanford and StartX and Mark Colwell from Senator Jerry Moran's office. If you're reading this, you know who I am, and those other three were all important players in helping to stop SOPA earlier this year. Feel free to vote and hopefully our panel will get picked.

There are, as always, plenty of other great panels to check out as well. I haven't had a chance to go through them all, but here are a few others that would be great, if you're looking for ones to vote for:

A discussion between two of the key Congressional staffers who (from opposite ends of the political spectrum) helped team up to defeat SOPA: Jayme White from Senator Wyden's office and Laurent Crenshaw from Rep. Issa's office, talking about Congress and the internet, and how to prevent future SOPAs from happening.

In Defense of Mashups looks interesting in that, among others, it would have Eric from Padmapper on the panel, and he's currently being sued by Craigslist for "mashing up" Craigslist with maps to make Craigslist more useful.

I learned a while back that when the Bomb Squad/Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee speaks, you should listen, so vote for his panel (also with Julie Samuels at EFF, Michael Petricone at CEA and Paul Geller from Grooveshark) on making free content work for fans and for artists.

Similarly, former rockstar, now brilliant business strategist Dave Allen is always worth following, especially when he'll be on a panel with Brian Zisk talking about music tech startups.

from the are-they-sure? dept

One of the unresolved problems of copyright is how to deal with huge numbers of orphan works -- creations still in copyright, but whose owners can't be traced to give permissions that may be necessary for re-use. The European Parliament's JURI committee met recently to vote on a new report on possible permitted uses of orphan works, prepared by the Polish Member of the European Parliament, Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg.

During the vote I was making precise notes as to the balance of votes in favour and against to my crucial amendments.

It came to me as a surprise that for my Compromise Amendments 20 check vote announced by the Chair was 14 to 12 which gives us 26 Members!

Considering that we only have 24 Members in Juri Committee and according to the protocol only 23 were present this result is confusing and calls for clarification.

Similar situation appears on Amendment 71 (Ms. Gallo and Mr. Borys) which pass with the result announced 13 to 12 what gives as 25 Members and my Amendment 32 which fall 13 to 11 -24 Members.

So the question has to be asked: did the copyright industry lobby really win, or was there some miscounting along the line? To avoid the impression of anything improper going on here, it's vital that those votes be taken again. After all, as Falkvinge points out:

The final kicker here is that the 113-per-cent voter turnout happened in the Legal Affairs committee (JURI), which has the responsibility of safeguarding the integrity and trustworthiness of the legal framework as a whole in Europe.

from the if-you'd-like-to-see-me-speak dept

It's that time of the year again, where the SXSW PanelPicker opens up for public voting. This year, I just pitched one session, for SXSWfilm, which I'm pretty excited about if it gets chosen. Rather than a typical panel, it's going to be an open brainstorming session for filmmakers, trying to come up with cool plans to better "connect with fans" and give those fans a "reason to buy." I'm really excited about the team that's ready to take part in this workshop, as they've got a ton of experience and smarts in this field, including filmmaker/author Jon Reiss (who beyond his long career in film has also written books like Think Outside the Box Office and regularly holds similar workshops), indie film marketer Sheri Candler (who is also writing a book with Reiss entitled Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul) and filmmaker/consultant Ross Pruden, who (among other things) runs the #infdist panel on Twitter, which is an ongoing conversation on how to better connect with fans and give people reasons to buy. If we get picked, it should be a blast.

Separately, while I didn't organize it, Alex Wright was kind enough to add me to his panel on Creative Business Models Beyond Copyright for SXSWinteractive. The idea behind this panel is to get people -- especially smaller businesses or those just starting out -- to think outside the box about alternative business models that go beyond just relying on copyright. Once again, I imagine it'll be a fun discussion. If you'd like to see me speak at SXSW, please vote for those two panels. Thanks!

Some other potentially interesting panels (I have no association with any of these, they just looked interesting scrolling through the list):